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It’s a Myth That Pedestrians Hate Bike Lanes

Bike lanes insert order on streets that were once governed by chaos. Before bike lanes came to Brooklyn’s Prospect Park West, 75 percent of cars were speeding. With the lanes installed, fewer than one in four cars break the speed limit. On Manhattan’s Ninth Avenue, sidewalk cycling fell 84 percent after the bike lanes went in. According to the Department of Transportation, streets with the lanes see 40 percent fewer fatal or injurious crashes than streets without them.

The bike lanes' record: fewer speeding cars on Prospect Park West, less sidewalk cycling on Ninth Avenue, and saner truck loading zones on the East Side.

Last year, more than 75,000 motor vehicle crashes occurred on city streets and fewer than 4 percent involved a bicycle. Bike lanes make streets safer for pedestrians and drivers. It’s the streets without bike lanes that New Yorkers should be worried about.

Since the city added 250 miles of bike lanes in the last four years, New Yorkers have voted with their pedals. During that same four-year period, daily cycling counts have more than doubled. It's this growth -- cycling is up 109 percent since 2006 -- that lets us know how effectively bike lanes make for more bicyclists.

Pedestrian safety is on the rise as well because of the bike lanes, not in spite of them. The safest traffic year since the city began keeping records 100 years ago was 2009, alongside double-digit percentage increases in cycling counts for each of the preceding three years.

While New York has changed around us, the design of our streets has not changed in 50 years. Streets and sidewalks make up 80 percent of public space in the Big Apple. Now those streets and sidewalks are being made more amenable to the majority of New Yorkers, and the majority of New Yorkers walk, take transit and, increasingly, ride a bike.

Whether it is a construction project in your path or a service change on your subway line, New York’s perpetual motion means we all have to alter our routines sometimes. Changing our routine of designing streets just for cars has already paid dividends in how those streets function. Now, on First and Second Avenues, locations with new protected bike lanes, we see trucks in new loading zones instead of double-parked, as in the past. We hear every day from pedestrians who say they are less afraid to cross these wide avenues because bike lanes have slowed traffic and created dedicated refuge islands for walkers.

Before it was built, it was common for New Yorkers to be wary of the Brooklyn Bridge. The press chronicled every growing pain in its design and construction -- and every skeptic was proved incorrect at every turn. Bicycling is set to be New York’s next iconic marker. Let’s take a deep breath and see where the lanes take us.